Editor Quick Start
Try making a score you can paste into the game
What you already have
Three starting points, three different routes. Find yours first:
| What you have | Which route |
|---|---|
| Nothing at all — you want to write a piece from scratch | This page. Start at section 1 and read down |
| A block of MML someone gave you | Clipboard in the title bar → Paste from clipboard. Details in the clipboard section |
A MIDI file (.mid) | File in the title bar → Choose a file. Details in MIDI to MML |
This page only covers the first route. At the end you will have a seven-note tune that really does paste into the game's Blank Score — but the tune is not the point. The point is that you will know what every place you passed through on the way is for.
Not sure what MML even is? You can read the Mabinogi MML syntax guide first, but you do not have to — this page never asks you to type a single letter of it.
The five areas
From top to bottom the editor has five areas, with a draggable splitter across the middle:
| This area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title bar | Four ways in and out: Clipboard (moving scores to and from the game), File (import and export), Share (create a link), Settings |
| Toolbar | Playback on the left half, editing on the right: the note-drawing tools, zoom, undo and redo, and the five functions Tempo / Velocity / Transpose / Optimise / Merge |
| Piano roll | Where you draw notes with the mouse. The keys down the left side make a sound when clicked; the thin strip along the top is the bar ruler |
| Score area | Tabs along the top, MML text below. One tab is one complete score, handed to one person |
| Status bar | The bottom line: how many scores, how many notes, tempo, total length, when it was last saved, engine state |
Get these two words straight first — everything below depends on them.
A score (a tab) is one sheet handed to one player. It has its own instrument and its own name. Up to 15 of them.
A track is one of the four lanes inside a score: Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 / Vocal — the four comma-separated segments of the game's Blank Score. The character limit is counted per track, separately.
1. Listen first
What you get on opening the site is not a blank page but a finished piece (ten scores, ten instruments). Touch nothing yet — just press ▶ Play at the left of the toolbar.
Three things happen at once, and each is worth a glance:
- A line sweeps left to right across the piano roll — that is the playhead, and whatever it is passing over is what you are hearing
- The view turns the page by itself. That is Follow doing its job; if you scroll horizontally by hand during playback it switches itself off (you evidently want to look somewhere else), and one click turns it back on
- The MML in the text pane lights up as it goes — whatever is lit is the letter currently sounding
The button becomes ❚❚ Pause, and pressing it again gives ▶ Resume; Stop returns to the beginning. Play and Stop have no keyboard shortcut — the buttons are the only way.
To hear just a middle section: left click on the bar ruler to set the start and right click to set the end, and Part in the toolbar lights up. All clears those two markers and goes back to the whole piece. Loop next to it restarts from the top the moment playback reaches the end.
Neither pane can be edited during playback. The roll and the text pane are read-only while the piece is playing, and that is deliberate — press Pause or Stop before changing anything. You can edit while paused; the changes take effect when you press Resume.
2. Clear the page
To write your own, the demo piece has to go. It lives at title bar → File → Clear at the bottom → Clear all notes.
That clears all 15 scores and leaves 1 empty one; the file name and key signature are kept and the instruments go back to default. Ctrl+Z undoes it, so press it without worrying.
To get the demo piece back, click the 夜光 MML Workshop wordmark in the top-left corner. That button means "start over" — it wipes what you have saved and reloads the demo. It does ask first, but once you confirm, Ctrl+Z will not bring it back. That is why Clear all notes above is the one to use at this step: that one you can undo.
3. Draw seven notes
We are going to draw the first seven notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol. Not because it is easy, but because you can hear when it is wrong — nobody notices a wrong note in a scale, but a wrong note in Twinkle Twinkle is obvious the moment it sounds.
Look at the middle of the toolbar. Select only is arrow mode (it draws nothing), and the six buttons 1 to 32 to its right are the note length: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second.
Press 3 for a quarter note (or just click the 4 button). Then left click seven times on the roll, in this order:
Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol
Find the pitch using the keys down the left — clicking a key sounds that note, so listen for the right one before clicking the cell to its right. Middle Do is on the o4 row.
Four things you can do while drawing; the hint on the right of the toolbar says the same:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Left click on empty space | Places a note of the length you selected |
| Drag a note | Moves it (up and down for pitch, left and right for position) |
| Drag a note's right edge | Changes its length |
| Right click a note | Deletes it (it becomes a rest of the same length, so nothing after it shifts) |
To stretch that last Sol into a half note, drag its right edge one cell further. Press Esc before letting go if you change your mind.
Press ▶ Play when you are done. If it sounds like Twinkle Twinkle, it is right. Right-click any wrong note and draw it again, or press Ctrl+Z.
Delete also deletes: select the note first, then press Delete. But it only means that while focus is outside the text pane — inside the text pane, Delete deletes characters. The reference page covers this properly.
4. Look at the text pane
Look down at the text pane. The seven notes you just drew are already a line of MML, roughly like this:
l4ccggaag2
The actual numbers depend on which row you drew on (there will be an octave mark such as o4 as well), but the shape is the same.
The roll and the text pane are two views of the same data, not two files. That has three consequences you can use straight away:
- Edit the MML by typing in the text pane and the roll changes immediately
- Select a span of text in the text pane and the matching notes are selected in the roll — and the other way round
- Double-click a note in the roll (in Select only mode) and the text cursor jumps to that note. This is how you find things in a long score
Editing in the roll regenerates the whole track's MML. Not one note changes, but any comments and manual formatting you wrote will be lost. So the habit is: get the notes right in the roll first, and format by hand last — never the other way round.
5. Add a harmony
The text pane has three boxes side by side: Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 — the three tracks of one score. (On a narrow window they stack vertically, and on a phone they become three small tabs.)
What you drew is in Melody. Click the Harmony 1 box and the roll's focus moves to that track; then draw a few long notes the same way as an accompaniment — say Do Do Fa Do, each a half note (press 2).
While you draw you will see the melody track's notes still there, but drawn as outlines; the track you are editing is solid. Notes from the other tracks in this score, and from the other scores, all stay on screen at different intensities — that is so you can line things up.
Press Play again and the two lines sound together.
One track can only sound one note at a time. Chords have to be split across tracks (one note in Melody, one in Harmony 1, one in Harmony 2); you cannot write [ceg] — the game does not accept that form, and this site has retired it. See the FAQ.
For a vocal score, switch the Instrument score dropdown in the instrument row to Vocal score: there is then a single Vocal track. Switching never discards the other side — switch back and everything is still there.
6. Set the tempo
Do not type the tempo into the text pane by hand — use the Tempo button in the toolbar. It writes t in the right place and deals with notes that cross a tempo change.
- Press Tempo
- For Position choose Start of track (choose "Before the selected note" only if the tempo changes mid-piece, and select a note first)
- Drag the Tempo (BPM) slider. Preview next to it plays a fixed rhythm pattern so you can hear the tempo on its own
- Press Apply
Every score has to carry its own tempo. This is the easiest thing to get caught by in this version: a score is copied to one person, and without a t that person plays at their own default speed.
Worse, it sounds right here — playback always converts against the tempo reference, so there is nothing to hear on this site and it only drifts once you are in the game. When tempos disagree the status bar keeps a warning up with the button that fixes it right beside it, and the tempo dialog has Sync all scores to match every score to the reference in one go.
7. Watch the character count
Each track has a pair of numbers to its right, for example 7 notes · 12/1600 chars. That is the count after export, with spaces and line breaks excluded — so you can use line breaks to separate bars without paying for them.
The four tracks have different limits:
| Track | Limit |
|---|---|
| Melody | 1,600 characters |
| Harmony 1 | 1,200 characters |
| Harmony 2 | 900 characters |
| Vocal | 1,200 characters |
This is a hard limit set by the game: go over it and the score will not paste into a Blank Score. The count turns red when you do, but nothing stops you carrying on editing. The number shown on screen is the limit actually in force — where it disagrees with this table, believe the screen.
If you really are over: the Optimise button in the toolbar, starting with Lossless (which does not touch a single note). Only consider the others if that is not enough — they change the sound. See the Optimise section of the reference page and the FAQ.
8. Paste it into the game
The last step. Title bar → Clipboard → Copy current score on the right.
That copies the current score as a block of MML@…; text with all four segments (Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 / Vocal) inside it, ready to paste straight into the game's Blank Score. Copying strips whitespace — that is what the game counts.
If a track is over its limit it still copies for you, but it says so: "this one will not paste into the game's Blank Score". Go back and shorten it first.
For an ensemble: one score goes to one person, so you have to switch to each tab and copy it separately. Copy all next to it produces a multi-line block that cannot be pasted into the game as a whole — but each line individually can, and pasting that block back into this site restores the score names and instruments too, which makes it good for backups or for sending to a friend.
Your work stays in this computer's browser (Autosave in the settings drawer), so a refresh or a restart picks it up again, and nothing is uploaded to the server. To give someone a link, use Share — that one needs you to sign in.
Where to go next
- Editor reference and keyboard shortcuts — every button, every key, and how Velocity, Transpose and Merge work
- Mabinogi MML syntax guide — if you would rather write the text directly
- MIDI to MML — turn an existing piece into a score without drawing note by note
- FAQ — sound banks, saving, character limits, sharing